Shifting impressions
Angela Summerfield
Callum Innes: From Memory Modern Art, Oxford, until 15 April Abstract art in Britain, in its widest sense, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among collectors, art dealers and curators; a time span which runs from the 1960s to the latest recipient of the Turner Prize, Tomma Abts. Callum Innes, still only in his mid-forties, is Scotland’s premier abstract painter. He is represented in leading public collections and by commercial galleries in London, New York and Dublin; he was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize 2002 and showed at Tate, St Ives in 2005. The current show, organised by the dynamic Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, features a selection of small and large-scale paintings created over the past 15 years. They are imbued with a sense of art history: think of Malevich’s ground-breaking Supremacist black and white paintings, Rothko, and American Hard-Edge Abstraction and Field Painting in general.
The earliest work in the exhibition, from 1989, is the black oil-painted form of a wild cucumber ‘sunken’ into corrugated cardboard, which gives the show its title. It is a key work, according to the artist, and represents a substantial body of works on paper, which includes printmaking. Indeed one gets the impression that the rich range of blacks (lamp, vine, charcoal, mars and scheveningen), concern for texture or matt surfaces, and the use of shellac and turpentine as paint media are the result of the artist’s engagement with graphic art; shellac, a type of resin, is used in etching to stop the acid biting into the metal plate. Since 1989, Innes has created around 3,500 works, 75 per cent of which he has destroyed. However, he keeps a photographic record of everything he has created, as a memory bank to draw on, and from this procedure has evolved a rigorous technical vocabulary of his own.
A central part of Innes’s art practice is the idea of time-based processes. Works such as the recent five-painting series ‘Exposed Painting Dioxazine Violet’ and the ‘Exposed Painting Veronese Green’ are outcomes of a meditative process of ‘unpainting’, whereby turpentine, normally used by artists as a cleaning agent, is poured or applied with myriad brush strokes to reveal painted layers, or the gesso-primed canvas itself; an evolutionary approach which can take up to three months. These multilayered, bold rectilinear forms achieve a monumentality, their presence extending beyond the picture plane into the room. The title ‘Exposed’ is a conscious reference to the negative–positive nature of photography and its act of freezing a moment in time, and the interplay of light and dark.
Innes has also talked about the profound effect of his Scottish east coast walks and the keen awareness of vastness and light this has engendered. A spatial dialogue is achieved in these works, whereby the white gesso primer evokes the horizon line. Other works on display involve a more gestural, immediate and sustained method of creation. There are pictures covered with cascading channels of paint or turpentine, such as the amber-coloured ‘Formed Painting No. 2’, 1991, and the ‘Resonance’ series of paintings, which include the ‘white’ painting ‘Resonance 17’, with its glacier-like fissures; or the creation of pitted organic surfaces, such as ‘Untitled 2002’, where films of linseed oil are orchestrated with a variety of brushstrokes-applied shellac. While the resulting paintings present a calm presence, the act of creation can be intense, uncertain and chaotic. Impact and lasting impressions lie at the heart of Innes’s work.
Despite Innes’s sensitive use of colour elsewhere, the outstanding paintings in this exhibition are monochromatic. ‘Two Identified Forms’, 1995, ‘Three Identified Forms’, 1993 (Tate Gallery), and ‘Monologue Seven’, 2003, encapsulate the artist’s ideas about ‘fragility and flow’ and achieve a veil of shifting impressions and presences.
Previous page
